If you’re the biblically minded sort, then the trouble began when a jealous Cain clubbed Abel to death, but if you’re evolutionarily minded, then it’s a “chicken and egg” question. Violence had no beginning, except perhaps in the Big Bang; it was always here, coded into the DNA.

The issue isn’t really guns. Guns are how we misspell evil. Guns are how we avoid talking about the ugly realities of human nature while building sandcastles on the shores of utopia.

The obsession with guns, rather than machetes, stone clubs, crossbows or that impressive weapon of mass death, the longbow (just ask anyone on the French side of the Battle of Agincourt) is really the obsession with human agency. It’s not about the fear of what one motivated maniac can do in a crowded place, but about the precariousness of social control that the killing sprees imply.

Mostly it’s about people who are sheltered from the realities of human nature trying to build a shelter big enough for everyone. A Gun Free Zone where everyone is a target and tries to live under the illusion that they aren’t. A society where everyone is drawing unicorns on colored notepaper while waiting under their desks for the bomb to fall.

After every shooting there are more zero tolerance policies in schools that crack down on everything from eight-year-olds making POW POW gestures with their fingers to honor students who bring pocket knives to school. And then another shooting happens and then another one and they wouldn’t happen if we just had more zero tolerance policies for everyone and everything.

Zero tolerance for the Second Amendment makes sense. If you ban all guns, except for those in the hands of the 708,000 police officers, the 1.5 million members of the armed forces, the countless numbers of security guards, including those who protect banks and armored cars, the bodyguards of celebrities who call for gun control, and any of the other people who need a gun to do their job, then you’re sure to stop all the shootings.

So long as none of those millions of people, or their tens of millions of kids, spouses, parents, grandchildren, girlfriends, boyfriends, roommates and anyone else who has access to them and their living spaces, carries out one of those shootings.

But this isn’t really about stopping shootings; it’s about controlling when they happen. It’s about making sure that everyone who has a gun is in some kind of chain of command. It’s about the belief that the problem isn’t evil, but individual agency, that if we make sure that everyone who has guns is following orders, then control will be asserted and the problem will stop. Or if it doesn’t stop, then at least there will be someone higher up in the chain of command to blame. Either way authority is sanctified, control or the illusion of it, maintained.

We’ll never know the full number of people who were killed by Fast and Furious. We’ll never know how many were killed by Obama’s regime change operation in Libya, with repercussions in Mali and Syria. But everyone involved in that was following orders. There was no individual agency, just agencies. No lone gunman who just decided to go up to a school and shoot kids. There were orders to run guns to Mexico and the cartel gunmen who killed people with those guns had orders to shoot. There was nothing random or unpredictable about it. Or as the Joker put it, “Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying.”
Gun control is the assertion that the problem is not the guns; it’s the lack of a controlling authority for all those guns. It’s the individual. A few million people with little sleep, taut nerves and PTSD are not a problem so long as there is someone to give them orders. A hundred million people with guns and no orders is a major problem. Historically though it’s the millions of people with guns who follow orders who have been more of a problem than millions of people with guns who do not.
Moral agency is individual. You can’t outsource it to a government and you wouldn’t want to. The bundle of impulses, the codes of character, the concepts of right and wrong, take place at the level of the individual. Organizations do not sanctify this process. They do not lift it above its fallacies, nor do they even do a very good job of keeping sociopaths and murderers from rising high enough to give orders. Organizations are the biggest guns of all, and some men and women who make Lanza look like a man of modestly murderous ambitions have had their fingers on their triggers and still do.

Gun control will not really control guns, but it will give the illusion of controlling people, and even when it fails those in authority will be able to say that they did everything that they could short of giving people the ability to defend themselves.

We live under the rule of organizers, community and otherwise, whose great faith is that the power to control men and their environment will allow them to shape their perfect state into being, and the violent acts of lone madmen are a reminder that such control is fleeting, that utopia has its tigers, and that attempting to control a problem often makes it worse by removing the natural human crowdsourced responses that would otherwise come into play.

The clamor for gun control is the cry of sheltered utopians believing that evil is a substance as finite as guns, and that getting rid of one will also get rid of the other. But evil isn’t finite and guns are as finite as drugs or moonshine whiskey, which is to say that they are as finite as the human interest in having them is. And unlike whiskey or heroin, the only way to stop a man with a gun is with a gun.

People do kill people and the only way to stop people from killing people is by killing them first. To a utopian this is a moral paradox that invalidates everything, but to everyone else, it’s just life in a world where evil is a reality, not just a word.

An armed society spends more time stopping evil than contemplating it. It is the disarmed society that is always contemplating it as a thing beyond its control. Helpless people must find something to think about while waiting for their lords to do something about the killing. Instead of doing something about it themselves, they blame the agency of the killer in being free to kill, rather than their own lack of agency for being unable to stop him.

by Craig Harris – Nov. 21, 2012 10:18 PM The Republic | azcentral.com
Arizona Land Commissioner Maria Baier, who has worked for two Republican governors and served on the Phoenix City Council, will leave state government to become chief executive of the Sonoran Institute.

“I’m really excited about it,” Baier said of her new job. “They do great work. They really try very hard to bring diverse interests together on land issues that affect the western United States.”

Baier’s last day with the state agency, which is responsible for managing millions of acres of Arizona trust land, is Nov. 29. She becomes the Sonoran Institute’s CEO on Dec. 3.

“Maria was our top choice, and we are thrilled she has accepted our offer,” said Bill Mitchell, chairman of the institute’s board. “We are very excited about the enthusiasm, vitality and vision that she brings to our organization for the future.”

The Sonoran Institute is a Tucson-based non-profit organization involved in public-policy decisions affecting land issues in western North America. For the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2011, the institute reported having 53 employees, nearly $2.1 million in net assets and $6 million in revenue.

Baier will replace Luther Propst, who founded the organization in 1991 and has led the Sonoran Institute since its inception.

Baier, 51, quipped that Sonoran’s CEO job opens only every two decades and that it was something she couldn’t turn down.

John Shepard, senior adviser for the institute, said Baier brings expertise in land management and public policy from her roles in state government and on the Phoenix council, where she served before becoming land commissioner.

Shepard said the group expects Baier to expand the organization in intermountain states.

Baier said she will divide her time in her new job between the Sonoran Institute’s Phoenix and Tucson offices and will travel to other offices in Montana, Colorado and Mexico.

Shepard declined to disclose Baier’s salary.

Propst was paid $120,640 a year, according to the group’s most recent financial records.

Baier, who lives in Phoenix, was appointed land commissioner in 2009 by Gov. Jan Brewer.

During Baier’s tenure at the Arizona State Land Department, the agency earned $560 million in revenue through leasing and sales of 25,000 acres of trust land.

Proceeds from the sales and leasing benefit schools.

Baier, who also worked for then-Gov. Fife Symington, said she was proud that the Land Department had started solar leases and wind farms while she ran the agency.

“Even in a bad economy, we generated a lot of money for the beneficiaries of the trust,” she said.

The governor called Baier a “wonderful asset” to her administration.

Brewer must now appoint a new commissioner.

Matthew Benson, a spokesman for the governor, said that if the governor does not appoint a replacement for Baier by Nov. 29, Deputy Commissioner Vanessa Hickman will become the acting commissioner.

Since October, the Bureau of Land Management has expanded its operations at two national monuments in southern Arizona, trying to crack down on smugglers and illegal immigrants who trample and trash the pristine desert on their way north from Mexico.

The federal agency has brought in more than a dozen law-enforcement rangers from other states to beef up patrols at the Sonoran Desert National Monument, south of Phoenix, where towering saguaro cactuses, wide-open valleys and flat-topped mountains create one of the most iconic vistas in the Sonoran Desert. The operations also have focused on the Ironwood Forest National Monument north of Tucson.

Because of their remote locations and ample hiding places, the monuments have become superhighways for violent smugglers sneaking drugs and illegal immigrants from the Mexican border into Arizona.

The smugglers have cast off acres of trash and created miles of illegal roads by plowing through the desert with disregard for the fragile vegetation, often using stolen vehicles that are driven until they break down and are abandoned, authorities say.

During seven two-week operations, the agency’s rangers have seized more than 27,000 pounds of marijuana and arrested more than 1,200 illegal immigrants, according to the BLM. That is in addition to the thousands of pounds of drugs and thousands of illegal immigrants arrested by law-enforcement authorities.

The agency also has removed 60 abandoned vehicles, 110 bicycles and more than 24 tons of trash, enough to fill 1,239 garbage bags. And the agency has covered up more than 15 miles of illegal roads.

But some of the agency’s work to protect the pristine desert areas from smuggling activity has caused concern among conservation groups.

Last year, the agency began erecting long vehicle barriers made of welded scrap-steel railroad tracks to block smugglers from driving vehicles through wilderness areas inside the Sonoran Desert National Monument. The barriers have been highly effective, BLM officials say. Not a single smuggler has driven into wilderness areas where the barriers have been installed, they say.

Conservation groups say the barriers, although effective, also mar the landscape. However, they view the barriers as the lesser of two evils.

Monuments under pressure

In 2000, President Bill Clinton created the Sonoran Desert and Ironwood Forest national monuments to protect them from urban sprawl extending south from Phoenix and north from Tucson.

The 487,000-acre Sonoran Desert National Monument is located between Gila Bend and Casa Grande, off Interstate 8. The area is the most biologically diverse desert in North America and is known for its abundant forests of saguaros interspersed with paloverde trees, creosote bushes, sage and ironwood trees.

The area also contains many archaeological and historic sites, including remnants of villages that once belonged to the ancestors of the Tohono O’Odham, Quechan, Maricopa and other Native American tribes.

The smaller Ironwood Forest National Monument encompasses 129,000 acres of desert west of Interstate 10 and north of Tucson. The area is known for its concentration of ironwood trees, some more than 800 years old, and its collection of more than 200 ancient Hohokam sites.

The Sonoran Desert National Monument includes the Vekol Valley, where one man was killed and another wounded in April 2011 during a shooting involving drug smugglers.

The smugglers have carved foot trails that spider through the desert and have left behind acres of plastic water bottles, coats, backpacks and other items cast off after trekking for days from the U.S.-Mexican border to rendezvous points 75 miles to the north along I-8, the main highway smugglers use to transport drugs and illegal immigrants to stash houses in the Phoenix area or to California.

“There is quite a bit of damage done by smugglers,” said Thom Hulen, executive director of the Friends of the Sonoran Desert National Monument, a group that advocates for the monument’s protection. “In addition to all the damage and all the trash, (the smuggling activity) scares people away. They get spooked.”

Signs of smuggling

During a tour of the Sonoran Desert National Monument one recent afternoon, Jon Young, the BLM’s chief ranger in Arizona, pulled his pickup truck off I-8 and stopped next to Mile Marker 157.

He told his passengers to wait in the truck while he got out to make sure there weren’t any drug smugglers hiding in the brush. Young poked around in the brush for a few moments and then gave a thumbs up.

The ground was littered with fresh signs of smuggling activity. Young picked up a boot made of carpeting used by smugglers to conceal their footprints. Strewn nearby were several burlap sacks, remnants of homemade backpacks used for hauling marijuana through the desert.

There were also several mud-caked jackets and lots of empty half-gallon plastic water bottles, colored black to make them less conspicuous in the sunlight.

Young pointed to the ground beneath the bushes, which had been matted down from the weight of smugglers. A well-worn path leading south toward the border also was clearly visible.

Young said smugglers typically hike four or five days through the desert with backpacks loaded with about 45 pounds of marijuana. They usually travel in groups of 10 to 15 but sometimes break into smaller groups.

They also are typically accompanied by a scout who, instead of drugs, carries a backpack full of food, water, radios and cellphones, Young said. Depending on how far the group is traveling, the smugglers may have several support people hiking with heavy packs full of food and extra water, he said.

Once they reach I-8, they hide until other members of the smuggling organization arrive to pick up their loads of drugs. The marijuana is then loaded into pickup trucks and driven to stash houses in nearby towns or the Phoenix area, Young said.

Smuggling has become so prevalent, the BLM has posted signs on roads leading into the monuments that warn the few remaining visitors to travel with caution. The agency doesn’t track visitors, but rangers and conservation groups have seen a decline in the number of hikers and campers who use the monuments, and many now carry guns for protection.

“Smuggling and illegal immigration may be encountered in this area,” the signs say.

Ranger teams

During operations at the monuments, the BLM transfers about 12 to 16 rangers from other states to Arizona. They work with the 10 rangers assigned to the BLM’s Phoenix district, which manages the Sonoran Desert monument, and 12 rangers assigned to the BLM’s Gila district, which oversees the Ironwood monument.

To combat smuggling inside the two monuments, the BLM rangers work with other law-enforcement officers who are part of the Alliance to Combat Transnational Threats, a group of law-enforcement agencies that includes the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Pinal County and Maricopa County sheriff’s offices.

The most recent operation ended last week, resulting in the collection of 219 bags of trash, the seizure of 6,000 pounds of marijuana and the discovery of the body of one migrant.

On a recent Saturday, Joe Nardinger, 38, a BLM ranger from the Upper Missouri Breaks National Monument in Montana, found 46 bundles of marijuana weighing 1,000 pounds while patrolling a wash on the Sonoran Desert National Monument.

Nardinger, who was sent to Arizona for two weeks, had been following some fresh tire tracks when he found the marijuana. It was hidden in the bank of the wash, covered by branches the smugglers had cut from nearby paloverde and mesquite trees.

“I smelled it before I saw it. I got a whiff, a big dose of it,” Nardinger said.

Installing barriers

In addition to beefed up patrols, the BLM has been cleaning up trash and getting rid of illegal roads and foot trails created by smugglers.

Despite the efforts, drug smuggling continues to increase in the area, although illegal-immigrant traffic is down, Young said.

Their cleanup and restoration work has been applauded by conservation groups. But conservationists are less enthusiastic about the vehicle barriers the BLM has been installing inside the Sonoran Desert National Monument.

Last fall, the BLM erected 1.3 miles of vehicle barriers at the southern end of the Sonoran monument abutting the border of the Tohono O’odham Reservation. They were intended to prevent smugglers from driving north from the reservation through the heart of the monument’s designated wilderness area.

Last week, the agency finished erecting about a quarter-mile of vehicle barriers northwest of the Table Top Mountain Range.

Those barriers are designed to prevent smugglers from driving south from I-8 to rendezvous points inside the monument.

The BLM plans to install more barriers in other parts of the Sonoran monument, Young said.

Known as Normandy barriers, after the coastal barriers used in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, the 2-foot-high barriers have proved effective in preventing smugglers from driving through wilderness areas and creating illegal roads,Young said.

The Border Patrol has installed miles of barriers along the Arizona border with Mexico.

But this is the first time Normandy barriers have been used away from the border, said Matt Skroch, executive director of the Arizona Wilderness Coalition, a conservation group.

The barriers mar the landscape, and conservationists are concerned that those being used inside the Sonoran monument will open the door to more in other pristine desert areas throughout the state, Skroch said.

“We certainly don’t want to see a scenario where we keep installing more and more vehicle barriers,” he said.

But the group isn’t opposed to the barriers outright, Skroch said, because so far, they have been effective in stopping smugglers from creating roads and destroying more of the desert landscape.

(Note: These groups thrive on the demise of human resource providing, and use ‘endangered species’ as the basis for countless lawsuits that are designed to implement The Wildlands Project and excise humans — except those ‘designated’ to keep tabs on the ‘endangered species’ — from most of this country, and the world.)

(Note: These groups thrive on the demise of human resource providing, and use ‘endangered species’ as the basis for countless lawsuits that are designed to implement The Wildlands Project and excise humans — except those ‘designated’ to keep tabs on the ‘endangered species’ — from most of this country, and the world.)

of $1.35 per month for a cow and her calf is one-tenth of market rates and is the minimum allowed by regulation. The extremely low grazing fee fails to cover the basic administrative costs of the federal grazing program.

showing that the federal grazing program costs taxpayers $124 million at a minimum, and likely as much as $1 billion annually in subsidies and other costs after subtracting fee receipts.

Over ten years ago, the US Departments of Agriculture and Interior and the General Accounting Office established that the formula used to calculate the fee is mathematically flawed, as it subtracts increases in the costs of production twice.

As a result the fee has barely risen above the $1.35 minimum, while market rates on equivalent private ranchlands have increased to almost 10 times greater.

The Forest Service proposed to reform the fee formula in 1994, but never announced a final decision on the reform, and kept on using the flawed formula.

“The Forest Service charges about as much to run a cow on public lands as it costs to feed a pet hamster. The U.S. taxpayer is being fleeced by this bargain basement sale of public resources,” stated Peter Galvin, Conservation Biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Galvin added “Livestock grazing on public lands is one of the major causes of species endangerment in the U.S.”

Joining the Center in this action are American Lands Alliance, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, Committee for the High Desert, Forest Guardians, Oregon Natural Desert Association, the Nevada Outdoor Recreation Association and Western Watersheds Project.

Bill Marlett, Oregon Natural Desert Association said that: “Low grazing fees coupled with big federal deficits means that monitoring and mitigation of cow-damaged rangelands will go neglected. It’s not just the American taxpayer who gets the shaft, but the streams, soils and wildlife on all of our Western public lands.”

Katie Fite, Conservation Director of the Committee for the High Desert, added: “The livestock industry claims that public lands ranchers have to invest more time and resources on federal lands than on private rangeland. This may be true in some cases, but USDA research in the mid 1990s showed that costs for private land ranchers average about $40 a cow higher than for public lands ranchers — exactly the opposite of what industry claims.”

Charles Watson, of the Nevada Outdoor Recreation Association added that: “The low fee has encouraged overgrazing, massive erosion and invasion by noxious vegetation, leading to the huge fires that have destroyed millions of dollars of private property in the West in recent years. The Forest Service has known about the flaw in the fee formula for years. It’s high time they fixed it.”

The lawsuit, which requires the Forest Service to make a final decision on the reform of the grazing fee formula, was filed in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., today, Wednesday, February 26, and will be argued by Eric Glitzenstein of Meyer and Glitzenstein.

Campbell is the executive director of the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection, aconsortium of about 40 environmental groups supporting a sweeping blueprint to manage growth throughout vast tracts of Pima County.

Suckling is the driving force behind the Center for Biological Diversity, an in-your-face environmental organization that has earned legions of friends and enemies since it set up shop here in the mid-1990s.

Between them, Campbell and Suckling define environmentalism in the Old Pueblo.

Campbell is a former staffer for Morris K. Udall, the southern Arizona congressman who has a permanent place in the hearts of most Western environmentalists.

A 21-year resident of Arizona, she has waged numerous battles on behalf of the Sonoran Desert. This latest one might be the most important.

“This is our one big chance,” Campbell says of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, which she is working to implement. “This is the largest project anyone has ever undertaken in the country.”

The plan essentially will determine where development may occur in the county.The Pima County Board of Supervisors endorsed the concept nearly three years [ago] and it is also supported by U.S. Rep. Jim Kolbe and outgoing Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt.Work on the plan is under way, and final adoption by the supervisors is scheduled for 2002.

“That’s a really aggressive schedule,” Campbell says. “But the county has been putting so much effort into it, I think we can pull it off.”

As the executive director of a coalition of conservation groups, Campbell balances competing interests and demands of an array of organizations. They range from the mainstream Audubon Society to the aggressive Center for Biological Diversity.

“We’ve calmed some of the radical elements, and we’ve aroused some of the more conservative elements,” Campbell says.

In Campbell’s view, environmentalists and developers have failed to communicate with each other. The running dispute served no one and may have worked against the environmentalist cause.

“We haven’t really tried to work together. We just tried to win,” she says. “There’s been no planning in Arizona because everyone was tugging at their elected officials.”

Don’t assume, though, that this greenie is going soft on developers. “Arizona,” she says, “has really been run by the development community.”

But through the conservation plan, Campbell says, developers and environmentalists can find common ground.

“How we grow, where we grow, I don’t think we should leave that up to chance,” she says.

Suckling says the desert conservation plan is an example of what can be done to stem the horrors of uncontrolled sprawl. “There was a crisis begging for a solution, and that solution is the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan,” he says.

On a whole host of other issues, though, Suckling’s views are decidedly more edgy. He’s less interested in finding common ground than in preserving ground.

“We’re going to fight as hard as we can,” Suckling says. “There’s a lot of aggressiveness there, but there has to be. If you go and battle developers and you’re not in there to win, you’re not going to win.”

The center catapulted itself into the headlines a few years ago when it flew to the defense of the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl.

Known at the time as the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity, the organization had previously focused attention on grazing, mining and logging issues. The pygmy owl forced it to change gears.

In the center’s view, the habitat of the endangered little owl was — and still is — far more important than a new high school the Amphitheater School District wanted to build on the Northwest Side. So it sued to stop construction of the school.

“It put us in the public eye in a really big way,” Suckling calls. “We had no choice but to jump in. It was like walking by a burning house. We had no choice but to run in and try to save the kid.”

A federal court ultimately allowed the school to be built, though with certain protections. Suckling remains undaunted.

“There’s a lot of groups that would not have taken on a school,” he says. “It’s really important that some group wants to be at the vanguard and say things like they are and take aggressive action to protect endangered species. That means you’re going to get criticism as well as praise. If you’re going to change the status quo, that is what’s going to happen. Everybody wants the praise, but a lot of groups are not willing to take the criticism.

“Our group is one that has been very willing to accept the criticism,” he continues. “If developers, miners and loggers aren’t mad at you, then you’re not changing the way they do business.”

Throughout the mid-1990s, the center filed more than 80 lawsuits on behalf of the environment.

Outside magazine not long ago proclaimed it one of the nation’s most effective environmental organizations.

Even a member of the Southern Arizona Home Builders Association called the center a “surprisingly clever and effective” group of “zealots.”

As the center’s most prominent zealot, Suckling says he and his colleagues are doing what they believe must to be done to protect endangered species and preserve as much of the desert as possible.

“This is an art, not a science,” he says. “It’s driven by passion and experience and creativity.”

Kieran Suckling is the policy director for the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona. The organization has helped obtain Endangered Species Act protection for 329 species and “critical habitat” designation for over 38 million acres.

Given a small grant by the Fund for Wild Nature, the organization started in 1989 as a small group by the name of Greater Gila Biodiversity Project, with the objective to protect endangered species and critical habitat in the southwest.[2] The organization later grew and became the Center for Biological Diversity. Kieran Suckling, Peter Galvin, and Todd Schulke founded the organization in response to what they perceived as a failure on the part of the United States Forest Service to protect the ecosystems in its charge. As surveyors in New Mexico, the three men discovered “a rare Mexican Spotted Owl nest in an old-growth tree”,[1] but their discovery was overshadowed by Forest Service plans to lease the land to timber companies; Suckling, Galvin, and Schulke believed that it was within the Forest Service’s mission to save sensitive species like the Mexican Spotted Owl from harm, and that the government had shirked its duty in deference to corporate interests.

Suckling, Galvin, and Schulke went to the media to register their outrage; the old-growth tree was allowed to stand, and this success led to the founding of the Center for Biological Diversity.

Initially, the CBD focused on issues specific to the Southwestern United States, but today its mission encompasses far-reaching problems such as global threats to biological diversity and climate change. The CBD employs a group of paid and pro bono attorneys to use litigation to effect change, and claims a 93 percent success rate for their lawsuits.[1]

On 13 June 2007, the CBD spoke out against a Bush administration proposal to reduce the protected area for spotted owls in the United StatesPacific Northwest. According to Noah Greenwald, the group’s representative in the Northwest, the proposed habitat cut is “typical of an administration that is looking to reduce protections for endangered species at every turn.” Greenwald said that the rollback is part of a series of “sweetheart deals,” in which the administration settles an environmental lawsuit out of court and, “at the industry’s wishes, reduces the critical habitat.” According to the Center, the move conforms to a broad trend that includes at least 25 earlier Bush administration decisions on habitat protections for endangered species. In those cases, the protected areas were reduced an average of 36 percent.[3]

On 16 December 2008, the CBD announced intent to sue the United States government for introducing “regulations… that would eviscerate our nation’s most successful wildlife law by exempting thousands of federal activities, including those that generate greenhouse gases, from review under the Endangered Species Act.” The lawsuit, which is critical of U.S. Interior DepartmentSecretary Dirk Kempthorne and President George W. Bush, was filed in the Northern District of California by the CBD, Greenpeace and Defenders of Wildlife. According to the CBD, “The lawsuit argues that the regulations violate the Endangered Species Act and did not go through the required public review process. The regulations, first proposed on August 11th, were rushed by the Bush administration through an abbreviated process in which more than 300,000 comments from the public were reviewed in 2-3 weeks, and environmental impacts were analyzed in a short and cursory environmental assessment, rather than a fuller environmental impact statement.”[4]